..............................................Business Solutions ProviderManassas, Virginia
Serving all of Northern Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC and various clients from around the world.
..............................................

Hopefully, at this point, light bulbs are popping over your head and bells are
ringing in your ears with reasons to use this great tool on your own projects.
Just in case there aren't, in the next few sections I'll cover a few
reasons why ColdFusion is a tool that we utilize for our repertoire of
development applications.

Database-Driven Sites

ColdFusion gives you the ability to control some of or all of your entire Web
site's content from a database. The beauty of this may not strike you just
yet, but consider a situation where you might be working with others who
aren't as HTML-savvy as yourself. Without ColdFusion, a change in content
means that someone has to come in and code a new HTML page, and that someone
will probably be you, regardless of the importance of whatever you were doing
when your pager went off. With ColdFusion, Web content can be changed or updated
by anyone who knows his way around an input form and an enter key. This means
that anyone in the company -- even those without database experience -- can
update their Web projects without you having to drive down to the office and
possibly miss the bonus round on "The Price Is Right."

In addition, database-driven sites give you the ability to present lots and
lots of material on the Web, and you only need to design a single template file.
Take my Liz database, for example. It's pretty small now, but someday if
that database should stretch into hundreds or thousands of husbands, my initial
template page would easily handle all of them. I'd have one killer website
that looked as if I'd spent hours designing pages.

Database-driven sites also present interesting opportunities to keep tabs on
your visitors. If your site required users to register with a login name and
password, for example, you could then use the database behind the scenes to
track their interests by logging the pages they visit.

Ready for Business

Many businesses love databases, and these businesses may come to love
ColdFusion. It's not hard to see why. Many businesses maintain a database
of their products or services, and for an existing database, ColdFusion makes it
a short hop to a full-featured website. Show me a business with a large product
catalog and I'll show you, the Web developer, a quick way to deliver a
full-featured website that will have your client dancing in the streets.

Real-Time Web Presentation

Many businesses can use ColdFusion directly with their active databases. This
means that the moment someone in the warehouse records a product as shipped, the
pages on the website immediately reflect the change in inventory. In most
cases, businesses can continue to use the same database, spreadsheet, or word
processing software they've always used in the same way they've always
used it. Just imagine the reception when you march into a business and tell its
owners that you can put their entire operation online in real-time -- without
their forking over a cent to retrain employees.

Interfacing With Intranets

Due to the nature of their product or service, some businesses don't
really require an extensive Web presence, but this doesn't mean that you,
the ColdFusion developer, need to pass them by. Lots of businesses use
ColdFusion as an intranet tool.

New Term -- An intranet is an internal network that is usually not
available to Web users. Intranets are used within businesses for employee tasks such as information sharing, maintaining the company
database, or vital communications such as "Hey, Jim in accounting, how was the big bash last night?"

Many businesses have found that using Web-like interfaces to control their
intranets helps new employees assimilate quickly and easily. Many have at least
experimented with a Web browser, so by presenting intranet data in the form of
Web pages, businesses can avoid having to acquaint new hires with several
applications.

ColdFusion is ideal for building these Web-based interfaces, and its database
functions are just as valuable on intranets as they are on the Web outside.

Business Security

Site security is generally a pretty big concern for businesses, whether
it's keeping the advertising staff from rewriting editorial copy or keeping
outsiders from rifling through the company secrets. ColdFusion has several
security measures built in to the program, meaning that even inexperienced CF
designers don't need to worry much about leaving their sites open to
hackers.

E-Commerce

ColdFusion is e-commerce ready, with lots of built-in tools and tricks that
make it easy to build sites offering secure online transactions. We have a tool
here that allows you to quickly serve up a huge database of products or
services, plus the ability to easily make them available for sale online. Bells
ringing yet?